Analysis: Xbox 360 poised to pass Wii in US sales by year’s end

Nintendo maintains worldwide sales lead, though, thanks in large part to Japan.

It's practically conventional wisdom at this point that the Wii has been the best-selling system of this console generation, overall. By sustaining retail sellouts for months after launch and routinely selling millions of consoles every holiday season, the Wii built up what was a seemingly insurmountable lead in the American gaming hardware market, judged purely on raw hardware sales (software sales and hours of play are different matters, of course).

But the conventional wisdom is wrong, at least in the US. Over the past three years, Microsoft has consistently eaten into Nintendo's "insurmountable" US sales lead, to the point that it seems that the Xbox 360 will end the year as the system with the most lifetime sales in America.

In the US, the Wii started out nearly 3 million units behind the Xbox 360 in the sales race, simply by dint of launching a year later. Nintendo's cheaper system quickly ate into that sales margin, though, and it had officially sold more Wiis in the US than Microsoft sold Xbox 360s by June 2008, according to data released by tracking firm NPD and the console makers themselves (the PS3 consistently lagged behind both systems in the US). The Wii sales bonanza didn't slow down from there, and by May of 2010 there were over nine million more Wii units circulating in the country than there were Xbox 360 units.

Unfortunately for Nintendo, this would represent the high-water mark as far as the system's dominance of the American sales charts. For the last three years (starting in June of 2010), the Xbox 360 has outsold the Wii in the US every single month (save for December 2008, when a sales surge led the Wii to beat the Xbox 360 by half a million units). Microsoft's sustained sales dominance in that period has reduced the Wii's American sales lead from over 9 million systems three years ago to just under 2 million units today.

Of course, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony will all have new consoles available by the end of the year, meaning time is starting to run out for the current generation of consoles. Will Nintendo be able to essentially run out the clock and maintain its dwindling US sales lead until Microsoft finally stops producing the Xbox 360?

It seems exceedingly unlikely. Over the last 12 months, the Xbox 360 has outsold the Wii in the US by an average of about 278,000 units a month. At that rate, the Wii's current accumulated lead will be completely dried up just in time for Christmas.

Note as well that the Xbox 360 outsold the Wii by 1.75 million units in November and December of last year alone. A repeat of that kind of performance would knock out practically all of Nintendo's current sales lead in one fell swoop. And there's reason to believe the Xbox 360 might have an even more dominant holiday season this time around, since the Xbox 360 still has a robust lineup of games planned for release later in 2013, compared to only a handful of licensed and multiplatform titles on the Wii.

Microsoft also seems poised to pad its US sales lead a little bit more before the Xbox 360 and Wii officially go the way of the dodo. Though Microsoft stopped producing the original Xbox hardware relatively quickly after the Xbox 360 came out in late 2005, Microsoft has said it plans for the Xbox 360 to continue selling for the next five years. That plan might not be so far-fetched; Sony didn't stop producing the PlayStation 2 hardware until earlier this year.

The sales situation in the US is being mirrored in the UK, where tracking firm Chart-Track confirmed today that the Xbox 360 is days away from taking the overall lifetime sales lead in the country, with both systems right around 8.4 million in total sales.

Nintendo fans can take heart, though, that the Wii is maintaining a sizeable sales lead in the rest of the world. That's especially true in Japan, where statistics from tracking firm Media Create (compiled here) show the Xbox 360 has sold a paltry 1.63 million units in the country through June 9, compared to 12.68 million lifetime Japanese Wii sales (and 9.3 million PS3 sales). The Xbox 360 isn't really poised for a US-style sales comeback in Japan either—the system's weekly sales in the country are now measured in the hundreds rather than the hundreds of thousands.

Enlarge/ Note: Data for this chart based on the best available information from within the past six months. Current numbers may vary slightly due to time differences. UK PS3 estimate extrapolated from 5 million sales announcement in October 2012. Sources: NPD, Media Create, Chart Track, official console maker announcements.

Current, precise numbers for other countries are hard to come by, but official data released by the three console manufacturers in recent months show the Wii as the best-selling system worldwide by a good margin, with somewhere around 100 million worldwide sales (99.84 million in March, to be precise). The Xbox 360 and PS3, on the other hand, are both hovering around three-quarters of that amount (75.9 million for the 360 as of March and 75 million even for the PS3 as of December). As you can see from the above chart, though, those sales are distributed very differently between the various major sales regions for game consoles.

Will either Sony or Microsoft be able to take the worldwide sales crown from Nintendo in the next few years? It seems unlikely. Then again, it seemed unlikely back in 2010 that the Xbox 360 would ever be able to eliminate the Wii's sizeable sales lead in the US. Now, that seems inevitable.

Do these horse race numbers really matter to the health of the three major console makers going forward? Not really, at a granular level. Still, it's interesting to see just how the trajectory of the concluding console generation has changed substantially over time and how much the competitive environment varies in different parts of the world. Plus, it's always fun to claim bragging rights for your console of choice.

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Just how many 360s were replacements? RROD was a real pain in the ass for Microsoft.

The biggest thing I took from this data is that "Rest of the world" represents roughly half of all the console's sales. Even if you have the best game targeting the big 3 markets(nigh impossible), that's still half of the potential consoles out there.

217 posts | registered Apr 19, 2012

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106 Reader Comments

You also have to remember that several people bought multiple XBox 360s due to RROD issues, I imagine the number of people who bought multiple Wiis due to hardware failure is much lower. That will potentially skew the sales in Microsoft's favour, though by how much will probably be difficult to determine.

There were reports of optical drives failing in the older Wiis. I didn't believe them until my Wii started making nasty noises one day.

I bet you there's some place somewhere that the Gamecube beat PS2 in sales.

I'd take that bet.

Quote:

Plus, there's the backwards compatibility issue. Wii console buying is not so useful now that Wii U has backwards compatibility but the 360 as far as I know, is not compatible with the Xbox One.

Good point, but the article stated the 360 has been outselling the Wii since June 2010. Also, Wii U sales are so low that I don't think it is affecting Wii sales much.

Except that Wii U sales started just before the Christmas rush last year - and WERE high initially - that is a bump that got stolen directly from the Wii. (The Wii had only the tiniest holiday bump in 2012, as holiday buyers who wanted a Nintendo product bought the Wii U.)

And the backward compatibility combined with low price makes for an easy up-sell. As was said, both PS4 and XBone are missing backward compatibility, so their predecessors will live on. Want to play Wii games? Want a newer-generation console? Buy a Wii U. Want to play XB360 games? Want to buy a newer-generation console? Tough. Buy two. (Or just opt for the lower-priced 360.)

Probably a good thing their sales are so good now, they should bank that money while they have the chance. Given how much of a joke the xbox 1 has been since its announcement I would wager that they are not going to fare quite as well in the next console generation.

I was a 360 fan all through this gen, I bought the ps3 much later and pretty much only for exclusives. This generation I figure after a fat PC upgrade I will shell out for the PS4, and unless microsoft can score some compelling exclusives (I am over Halo and Gears of War) I see no need to bother with their overpriced Kinect required NSA trap.

You also have to remember that several people bought multiple XBox 360s due to RROD issues, I imagine the number of people who bought multiple Wiis due to hardware failure is much lower. That will potentially skew the sales in Microsoft's favour, though by how much will probably be difficult to determine.

Whatever the case may be, RROD issues or not, more people preferred to buy a new or another Xbox 360.

You also have to remember that several people bought multiple XBox 360s due to RROD issues, I imagine the number of people who bought multiple Wiis due to hardware failure is much lower. That will potentially skew the sales in Microsoft's favour, though by how much will probably be difficult to determine.

There were reports of optical drives failing in the older Wiis. I didn't believe them until my Wii started making nasty noises one day.

There were several people who bought multiple Xbox 360s due to RROD, or were they replaced? Because those failures were covered under warranty.

By sustaining retail sellouts for months after launch and routinely selling millions of consoles every holiday season, the Wii built up what was a seemingly insurmountable lead in the American gaming hardware market, judged purely on raw hardware sales (software sales and hours of play are different matters, of course).

By August or so of 2007 monthly Wii software sales passed those on the 360. In November of 2007 Wii 3rd party monthly software sales passed the 360's. By mid 2008 cumulative Wii software sales passed the 360's.

"Will either Sony or Nintendo be able to take the worldwide sales crown from Nintendo in the next few years?"

Should be Sony or Microsoft. I couldn't find a link to report typos.

Thank you, the error has been fixed. In penance, I am going to go buy 2 million Xbox 360s and then bury them in the New Mexico desert to pad Microsoft's numbers.

Before you do that, better remove all those old E.T. cartridges, otherwise those Xbox 360s won't fit. Your next problem is getting rid of all those cartridges. May I suggest giving them as replacements for broken Xbox 360s?

The XBox lineage of consoles is just so great! MS has all the forward looking ideas and is all about transforming gaming. If only everyone could see it.

And in fact, they do! In the USA, the current generation XBox 360 is likely to finally overtake the previous generation Nintendo console ('the Wii') in overall sales. Just shows how innovative MS really is.

By sustaining retail sellouts for months after launch and routinely selling millions of consoles every holiday season, the Wii built up what was a seemingly insurmountable lead in the American gaming hardware market, judged purely on raw hardware sales (software sales and hours of play are different matters, of course).

By August or so of 2007 monthly Wii software sales passed those on the 360. In November of 2007 Wii 3rd party monthly software sales passed the 360's. By mid 2008 cumulative Wii software sales passed the 360's.

That third fact, at the very least, is actually in the article...

Not that I saw. You made an early aside about software sales on the Wii, but after that talked only about cumulative hardware sales. My post was talking about software sales specifically, which is to say the Wii started selling more software than the 360 monthly in October 2007 and more 3rd party software the following by month. By mid 2008, the Wii had sold more total software than the 360.

By sustaining retail sellouts for months after launch and routinely selling millions of consoles every holiday season, the Wii built up what was a seemingly insurmountable lead in the American gaming hardware market, judged purely on raw hardware sales (software sales and hours of play are different matters, of course).

By August or so of 2007 monthly Wii software sales passed those on the 360. In November of 2007 Wii 3rd party monthly software sales passed the 360's. By mid 2008 cumulative Wii software sales passed the 360's.

That third fact, at the very least, is actually in the article...

Not that I saw. You made an early aside about software sales on the Wii, but after that talked only about cumulative hardware sales. My post was talking about software sales specifically, which is to say the Wii started selling more software than the 360 monthly in October 2007 and more 3rd party software the following by month. By mid 2008, the Wii had sold more total software than the 360.

You also have to remember that several people bought multiple XBox 360s due to RROD issues, I imagine the number of people who bought multiple Wiis due to hardware failure is much lower. That will potentially skew the sales in Microsoft's favour, though by how much will probably be difficult to determine.

It's even more complicated than that. Most RROD Xbox 360 units that went back to Microsoft for replacement were given new motherboards from later production and sold as refurbs. Those don't count in new unit sales but could prevent a bargain seeker from saving up for a new unit.

My first Xbox 360 was a Elite model refurb going for almost $125 less than the equivalent new unit at the time. It probably wasn't a RROD victim but it was a common example of what described above of a refurb (or used unit from a place like GameStop) canceling out a new unit sale. That unit is still going strong in my entertainment center with a Kinect attached, while a newer slim model is in the #3 position on my desk's KVM setup. The slim is also a refurb of the 4 GB variety. It was offered for a really good price at the same time I was offered a 250 GB 360 hard drive for a fraction of the normal MSRP.

So I have two Xbox 360s but neither count as sales of new units in the tracking. I have a ton of games but all purchased new at an average of $10. Everything turns up cheap eventually. Whether I would be considered a good customer or a bad customer is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose.

I bet you there's some place somewhere that the Gamecube beat PS2 in sales.

I'd take that bet.

Quote:

Plus, there's the backwards compatibility issue. Wii console buying is not so useful now that Wii U has backwards compatibility but the 360 as far as I know, is not compatible with the Xbox One.

Good point, but the article stated the 360 has been outselling the Wii since June 2010. Also, Wii U sales are so low that I don't think it is affecting Wii sales much.

Except that Wii U sales started just before the Christmas rush last year - and WERE high initially - that is a bump that got stolen directly from the Wii. (The Wii had only the tiniest holiday bump in 2012, as holiday buyers who wanted a Nintendo product bought the Wii U.)

And the backward compatibility combined with low price makes for an easy up-sell. As was said, both PS4 and XBone are missing backward compatibility, so their predecessors will live on. Want to play Wii games? Want a newer-generation console? Buy a Wii U. Want to play XB360 games? Want to buy a newer-generation console? Tough. Buy two. (Or just opt for the lower-priced 360.)

Are you seriously referring to the Wii U as a 'newer generation console?' Speaking as someone who owns one, that is a statement that can only be qualified in terms of chronology and not in terms of functionality. It's more of a trailing generation console. I used the backward compatibility to the Wii, which I never owned, as a rationale to justify the purchase but now regard it as a mistake. It's something that really could have waited a year or so. I guess it had been so long since I got in on a console launch, the last time being the PSP, I was taken by a fit of madness. The PS4 and Xbox One are going to have to inspired truly deranged technolust to get me to buy before 2015 or so.

It's not surprising that Xbox sales are catching up to Wii, the Wii is no longer a current gen console. I hope Nintendo gets some killer apps out to drive sales for the Wii-U, but its power will be far outshined by the Xbox One and PS4.

As far as backward capatibility is concerned, there's no way that Sony or Microsoft could make their consoles backward compatible without adding substantial costs to the console themselves. I would be willing to bet small amounts of money that the biggest reason the PS3 was so expensive at launch was because Sony included a PS2 processor on the motherboard of the PS3, Microsoft decided to emulate.

IMO the consoles don't need backward compatibility, although it kind of sucks for those who don't want to keep their current gen Sony and Microsoft consoles around. I keep my consoles, although my Xbox won't be seeing much action because the optical drive gave out a couple months ago and I'm not buying another Xbox to replace it.

This last statement may be the most ridiculous thing, but I thought that all of the RROD Xboxes were reman'd in Mexico and reimported as new, which is why they when to Mexico in the first place.

Just how many 360s were replacements? RROD was a real pain in the ass for Microsoft.

The biggest thing I took from this data is that "Rest of the world" represents roughly half of all the console's sales. Even if you have the best game targeting the big 3 markets(nigh impossible), that's still half of the potential consoles out there.

Actually .. "rest of the world" looks more like roughly a third ..

Personally I'm surprised that the UK has such big global market share .. I know us Brits tends to think of ourselves as important, but I honestly expected the rest of Europe (or the US for that matter) to dominate the sales figures much more than it appears they have ..

How many of those 360's sold represent replacements not replaced under the warranty that came rather late for those who had to re-purchase a 360 to play the games they've bought? Of course, many of those people wouldn't realize until later that MS had sold them a lemon console...

Moreover, quite a lot of those 360's represent Slims purchased by people who already owned the original version of the 360, too. Mainly because people were buying multiple 360's just to try and find one that was quiet and didn't have a tendency to RROD. The Slim finally represented that console.

So a lot of people bought them to replace the one they already had. Which likely died within a few years. Yes, that's even the ones manufactured after launch.

The 360 is perhaps one of the worst consumer products with regards to failure I've ever seen that didn't suffer a recall.

Personally I'm surprised that the UK has such big global market share .. I know us Brits tends to think of ourselves as important, but I honestly expected the rest of Europe (or the US for that matter) to dominate the sales figures much more than it appears they have ..

is a bit strange. beat out germany, guess they aren't as into video games.

By sustaining retail sellouts for months after launch and routinely selling millions of consoles every holiday season, the Wii built up what was a seemingly insurmountable lead in the American gaming hardware market, judged purely on raw hardware sales (software sales and hours of play are different matters, of course).

By August or so of 2007 monthly Wii software sales passed those on the 360. In November of 2007 Wii 3rd party monthly software sales passed the 360's. By mid 2008 cumulative Wii software sales passed the 360's.

and I believe now it is back the other way...3rd party sales are ahead on 360 and consoles are about even or 360 is ahead.

No, his post comes from the fact that he's an accountant who develops a twitch when people throw numbers around without any explanation of what they mean and why they're probably wrong. Personally I'm a PC gamer who owns a PS3 for exclusives and it made a cheap bluray player. Couldn't care less about the numbers, two prior gen consoles battling it out for the sales crown in a country I don't live in? Please. But so far we've seen quite a drop in sales, in May 2013 Microsoft sold 114k units, compared to 160k the year before. There's a pretty good chance they won't even sell 2m units before the end of the year with the upcoming consoles. The 360 will pass the Wii, that's basically a given at this point because the 360 is better supported and selling way more each month, but come on, some work besides some pretty graphics could have gone into the article.

I also took "dried up just in time for Christmas." to mean prior to the Christmas season, my apologies Kyle, it could come close. It's unlikely though, . Sorry about the "plain stupid" and calls for incrimination

If you had 5 replacement units, that is still tracked as ONE unit sold. The replacements don't enter into the discussion about sales units, but do on corporate profit sheets (as a loss).

There is lots of evidence that hardcore xbox gamers bought units while waiting for replacement units, or simply bought new units when the old ones failed, prior to Microsoft's generous warranty protection.

At any rate, there are vastly fewer working 360s in the wild - as a US install base, which is what this article seems to be concerned with - than the plain sales numbers state. Even consoles replaced under warranty fail eventually die. All the early 360 consoles would have higher failure rates than ps3, regardless of warranty replacements, which sometimes don't work (say, with a used console) and largely occurred before the bugs were eliminated with the 'slim' anyway.

Now, I don't think that's particularly relevant to US sales. 360 is clearly doing better than the other two in the US and UK.

But everyone knowledgeable already knew that, it's been that way since the 'reboot' of kinect and the 'slim' 360. And that was totally predictable, too, given that Sony has been worse at their cloud services and was nearly bankrupted by the ps3. MS had to sell better once it fixed the things depressing sales, i.e. matched Sony on reliability and matched the Wii on kiddie stuff.

I would think they could be #1 in the world, but I don't know all the region specific hassles of xbl or international-focused games that playstation has. Clearly their international sales are weaker, beyond the xenophobic Japanese market.

I'd love to be able to compare the nations that the ipad is sold/supported in to console sales and see if there's an effect there. I would think that the Wii would be hurt the most, which seems true based on recent sales history. That could also give us an idea if the next gen has a limited upside of casual sales. While I think the Kinect in particular has unique appeal, $500 is the wrong price for a children's toy.

Not regarding the actual value of the data, I would be more curious in the play time and software sales numbers.

Well I can tell you that my 360 has gotten considerably more use than my Wii or any other console I've ever owned, thanks to Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Skyrim!

I wish I could upvote this a thousand times. My old Wii was barely used after the initial "new toy" phase had past. By comparison, I've likely sunk in excess of a thousand hours into my 360. Those three games in particular (Lord almighty do I love Bethesda as a development studio) have stolen so much of my life that I'm convinced the game boxes should a cigarette-esque warning label.

Kind of pointless since the 360 and the PS3 are racing against a console that has already been replaced.It's like finishing 2nd in a race and claiming victory just because you kept running after the finish line.

Kind of pointless since the 360 and the PS3 are racing against a console that has already been replaced.It's like finishing 2nd in a race and claiming victory just because you kept running after the finish line.

Or, like a sprinter running in a marathon and claiming victory because he was in the lead after the first 400 meters?

Re. the discussion of 360 replacement under warranty, it might be worth mentioning that Microsoft extended its warranty period for that particular issue by several years (at a cost of over a billion $US, if I recall). I had a one RROD unit replaced gratis by Microsoft a couple of years after its original warranty had run out.

Nice article, Kyle. I like these kinds of stories, even if the numbers don't tell complete stories, they do tell stories. You've put it all in the proper context in my opinion. And yes, while these are old consoles and not new news, I think now is the right time to be taking a look back at the generational sales with one new console out and the other two hitting shelves very soon.

As a gamer who owns all three boxes it's really nice to see those 360 and PS3 numbers continuing to climb in a slow but steady fashion. Those two boxes are a fantastic buy with such a huge back library today. I really can't see how the prices can't drop this holiday, though. It just seems insane to me for Sony to be selling a $399, just-released PS4 next to a $299, 7-year-old PS3. It'll be interesting to see how soon the prices drop on the 360 and PS3, and how much longer they can sell. The PS3, especially, is a still going strong right now, IMO.

A bigger issue is that the PS2 outsold all of these consoles from March, 2006 on, with 49,500k units. Between PS2 sales and the Wii's outdated internals, I'd call this the "lost generation" of consoles.

Source: http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/PlayStation_2Basically this was the first google hit that implied cumulative data. An Ars article describing how the PS2 was outselling the Xbox360 was ahead, but only implied a datum for a single year.

Kind of pointless since the 360 and the PS3 are racing against a console that has already been replaced.It's like finishing 2nd in a race and claiming victory just because you kept running after the finish line.

Or, like a sprinter running in a marathon and claiming victory because he was in the lead after the first 400 meters?

Much better analogy. MS has already said they anticipate 360 for another 5 years. Which means it is going to have another 15-25mil in sales. This year it will be US and UK, then over the next couple of years a few more.